I was having a bowl of menudo yesterday and thinking about Elizabeth Warren. Not so odd a juxtaposition — chowing down the communal Mexican ‘breakfast of champions’ while chewing on the Massachusetts Senator who champions populist economics and battles predatory financial institutions.

A speech she gave last week criticizing the “striking lack of diversity” on the federal bench prompted my menudo musings about Elizabeth. She called for more “professional diversity”and decried the continued trend of “corporate judges” who keep getting nominated to the federal bench.

Her speech echoed the points made by an Alliance for Justice reportthat the federal judiciary lacks judges “with experience (a) working for public interest organizations; (b) as public defenders or indigent criminal defense attorneys; and (c) representing individual clients—like employees or consumers or personal injury plaintiffs—in private practice.” According to the Alliance, 85 percent of Obama’s nominees have either been corporate lawyer types or prosecutors and sometimes, both.

Preaching to the converted, she told her Alliance for Justice audience that President Obama’s federal bench nominees ought to “have represented people other than corporate clients.” Few have been public interest lawyers, labor lawyers, criminal defense lawyers, solo practitioners, or plaintiff’s trial lawyers.

The obvious implication is that once on the federal bench, by dint of their narrow work backgrounds exclusively representing “corporate interests” and their homogenous sociocultural experiences, the judges nominated will supposedly be more favorably predisposed to a conservative political world view. Warren and the Alliance suggest that the federal bench is stacked against the less powerful and weighted instead toward wealthy and politically conservative, pro-corporate special interests.

The reality, however, is that federal judicial nominees are chosen not so much because of their work experience but out of the mixed bag of political ideology; personal loyalty; party affiliation; their Senate confirmation potential; race, gender and judicial experience. And more often than not, candidates for appellate nominations also come from a state’s respective U.S. Senators. And those politicos have their own crony-bag of personal, ideological and politically connected favorites.

Apolitical judiciary?

And speaking of political ideology and party affiliation, as I riffed a while back, the irony is that life tenure for federal judges supposedly keeps them independent from those concerns. Canon 5 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges even says as much, “A judge should refrain from political activity.”

So are judges apolitical? The answer is ‘no.’ “Judges are as opinionated as anyone else – – – maybe, more so. Merely donning a black robe, doesn’t magically make ideological inclinations or political predilections disappear.”

Along with the myth about George Washington and the cherry tree and Lady Godiva’s naked ride through Coventry, it’s simple mythology like the one perpetuated of “Judges asUmpires.” The most famous proponent of that unfortunate baseball metaphor remains U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.